Women Are America’s Safety Net

Parenting in modern America is a high-wire act. For many parents, the experience is shaped by the dominant expectation of intensive, hands-on involvement; stressful competition for scarce slots in child-care and summer-camp programs; and a seemingly endless parade of breakdowns in areas as varied as infant-formula supply and college financial-aid forms. In the past few years, something of a cottage industry has sprung up for books detailing how difficult it is to be a parent, and particularly a mother, in modern America. Titles such as Jessica Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood and Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be come to mind.

In her new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net, the sociologist Jessica Calarco joins this conversation, and also pulls it in a new direction. She argues that America intentionally dumps onto women the burden of caring for all those who need it, whether children, the elderly, or those with long-term illnesses and disabilities. And she shows why doing so is harmful, not only for women, but for all of society.

Calarco’s book doesn’t just address parenting. But she sees the expectations placed on mothers as the wellspring from which other caregiving burdens arise. In the U.S., she writes, there’s a sense that “if women are the ones we expect to care for the children, then we might as well ask them to take care of the sick and the elderly while they’re at it.” In November 2020, in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic, Calarco, who is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told the writer Anne Helen Petersen, “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”

Holding It Together begins with a history of how that divergence happened. Starting in the 1930s, in response to New Deal policies positioning the government as a key source of support for struggling families, a nascent ideology called neoliberalism started to gain traction. Spearheaded by academics (Milton Friedman would become one of the world’s most famous neoliberal economists in the decades that followed) and backed by powerful business groups, neoliberalism theorized and advocated for a “DIY society”: one based on the idea that government action is an obstacle to individual and national prosperity, and individualistic free markets are the solution. As Calarco explains, Friedman and his compatriots argued that the very lack of a safety net would incentivize those facing poverty, unemployment, or other challenges to “make better choices and keep themselves safe.”

Today, neoliberal ideas hold sway in many aspects of American policy, leading to what the political scientist Jacob S. Hacker has called the “great risk shift,” where financial risk has moved from the government and corporations onto households. For instance, pensions have largely been replaced by volatile personal retirement accounts, and child care has become a market-based system captured, to an increasing degree, by private-equity firms, which now own eight of the 11 largest chains. At the same time, the public safety net that does exist (Calarco describes it as “threadbare”) is exceedingly difficult to navigate and places onerous requirements on its beneficiaries. The inadequacy of that safety net is made evident by the data: Primarily because of underfunding, only one in nine federally eligible children younger than 6 benefits from child-care assistance. And millions of children recently lost their Medicaid health coverage mainly as a result of red tape.

Calarco argues that because free-market logic inherently leads to winners and losers, someone must pick up those who inevitably fall. Women, time and again, have been called upon to do that job, providing the “safety net” that her title refers to: They are the ones who take time off work or pick up an extra job to cover child-care needs and costs, or drop everything when a family member gets sick. That women have been cast in this role is both overtaxing them and “leaving our whole society sicker, sadder, and more stressed,” Calarco writes. And because women have long been stepping up in the absence of public solutions for child care, health care, elder care, and so on, “it’s easy to assume that the free-market proponents were right all along—that we really can get by without a net.”

This societal model is buttressed by a series of what Calarco calls “myths,” including the beliefs that only women are innately drawn to caregiving roles, and that a mother’s effort is the primary determinant of how her children turn out. In an insidious way, these myths also let fathers off the hook. If women are born caregivers and men are not, then men can be praised for minimal contributions at home and might have little motivation to fight for stronger care policies. In a national study Calarco fielded during the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, she found that of the more than 2,000 families she surveyed, “84 percent of moms in mom-dad families said they would be the ones primarily responsible for caring for a child who got sick or had to quarantine.” Even when the woman was the primary breadwinner in a couple, this remained the case for 77 percent of mothers.

[Read: The devaluation of care work is by design]

To illustrate her points, Calarco practically pummels the reader with story after story of the real-life wreckage caused by overloading women with caregiving responsibilities. Sylvia, a young woman she speaks with in rural Indiana, steps up at age 15 to become the primary caregiver for her infant niece and, later, a nephew (her brother, the children’s father, was largely absent, and their mother fell into deep postpartum depression and began abusing drugs). Although Sylvia loves the children, taking on this responsibility meant she wasn’t able to go to college and had no choice but to work at a poorly paid job with no benefits. Calarco believes that this experience also “likely even pushed her into getting married and having kids of her own at a young age,” because her other options had become constrained.

Or take Erin, who moved with her husband back to his small Indiana hometown. When the couple had their first child, they had no viable child-care options. At first, they tried working staggered shifts, but it was too draining, so Erin decided to stay home with her son and then, when he was born three years later, his brother. Although some people enjoy being stay-at-home parents, Erin struggled. She found herself exhausted, isolated, and scrambling to afford necessities: With her first son, she regularly stretched diaper use to the point where he was getting rashes.

Calarco emphasizes that the lack of a robust or well-designed public safety net is a policy choice that affects more than just the women in question. Families regularly come up against the “benefits cliff”: If they begin to earn slightly more money, they lose vital assistance with food or child care. The U.S. treats child care, in particular, more as a private service like a gym instead of a vital piece of social infrastructure, leaving costs sky-high, availability low, and quality a toss-up. Many households earn too much to qualify for aid but too little to afford a child-care slot—Calarco calls them the safety net’s “missing middle.”

There is another, more deep-rooted consequence of expecting women to respond whenever needs arise: It reinforces an atomized society in which the idea of government support seems transgressive. Several women Calarco interviewed were reluctant to use public aid for which they were eligible; as Erin said, “I know it’s for people like us, but ... I don’t wanna use it, I don’t wanna abuse the system or anything.” Calarco’s work here echoes that of another sociologist, Sandra R. Levitsky, who has written that “the conceptual shift away from thinking about one’s situation as an individual problem or as a problem caused by fate or nature, to thinking about it as a social or public problem, is widely understood to be a necessary, if insufficient, condition for political action.”

Calarco never argues that government should replace family or neighborhood networks, but rather that strong government policies can distribute the load and enable everyone—both women and men—to care for loved ones without sacrificing so much of their health and well-being. As she asserts, no set of personal choices can reliably inoculate a family against the fact that things in life go awry and someone needs to be there when they do. Instead, Calarco calls for a much stronger net woven together not by weak, bureaucratic aid programs but by universal child care, universal health care, and paid family leave, as well as permanent versions of pandemic-era policies such as an expanded child tax credit and universal free school lunch. To finance these initiatives, she writes, we may have to rely on higher taxes on corporations as well as a wealth tax on ultrarich individuals—a path that American lawmakers have not, so far, had the political will to take.

[Read: The problem with ‘affordable’ child care]

Holding It Together leaves an important question lingering: Should care be part of a social safety net (there if you happen to need it), or something that is built into the very bedrock of the nation? A safety net, after all, exists primarily to catch people when they fall. But what if care were instead established as a proactive part of American society, akin to public schools, parks, and libraries? As the journalist Elissa Strauss muses in her new book, When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, “Care is as fundamental to the good life as justice, but it’s rarely presented in fundamental terms.” Strauss cites the work of philosophers such as Eva Feder Kittay who have argued that care should be woven into the social contract, embraced as an elemental aspect of the American dream. Although I suspect Calarco would agree with that concept, the framing of care as part of a safety net implies a narrower set of societal obligations.

Calarco’s work lays out two paths: Americans can continue to be ruled by a reflexive flinching away when the government seeks to interact with the family, or we can find a renewed approach whereby public policy acts as a fuel toward family self-determination. Congress currently has ongoing legislative efforts regarding the child tax credit, paid family leave, and child-care assistance, which may yet lead to stronger social infrastructure. Holding It Together suggests that robust legislation around these issues also has the potential to forge new levels of social connectivity and flourishing—and not just for parents. The alternative is asking American women to continue walking across a tightrope while juggling.